The Murdoch Contagion

Time was, knowing a Murdoch was a sort of golden ticket. A person who penetrated the perimeter of the family—befriending Rupert, or Wendi, or James, or Lachlan, or Elisabeth, or her husband, the public relations executive Matthew Freud—could hope to benefit from the support of the clan and its network of newspapers, television stations, publishing companies, and P.R. shops. Career advancement and social prestige were among the vicarious benefits of a Murdoch friendship or acquaintanceship. One could, presumably, learn the Murdoch way of doing business, and have one’s own efforts publicized. The family’s jets and yachts were helpful, too. Rupert Murdoch, appearing for the second day before the Leveson Inquiry yesterday (his testimony continues today), recalled that, in August, 2008, the future Prime Minister David Cameron travelled to the Greek island of Santorini, where members of the family had gathered on Elisabeth’s yacht. “He was being flown by my son in law’s [Matthew Freud’s] plane on his way to holiday in Turkey and he stopped in Santorini,” Murdoch said. “Politicians go out of their way to impress people in the press and I don’t remember discussing any political things with him at all. There may have been some issues discussed, possibly, but it wasn’t a very long meeting and I don’t really remember the meeting.” Must have been the ouzo, then.

These days, knowing a Murdoch is more pink slip than golden ticket. The body count of fired or discredited former intimates, colleagues, and retainers continues to rise: Andy Coulson, Rebekah Brooks, Tom Crone, Colin Myler, Les Hinton. (Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch characterized his former friend the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as “unbalanced.”) An epidemiological approach beckons here. Why were so many of Murdoch’s chief employees unethical or untrustworthy? Were such traits a prerequisite in hiring at News Corp., or were they transmitted over morning swims and lunches at Wapping? Who was the Patient Zero of the Murdoch contagion?

James Murdoch’s testimony at Leveson on Tuesday finished off several more associates. In conjunction with his appearance, News Corp. released a hundred-and-sixty-three page dossier of e-mails exchanged between Frédéric Michel, a senior lobbyist for News Corp., and Adam Smith, a special advisor to Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary. Hunt was in charge of approving or forbidding the controversial BSkyB deal—at a cost of twelve billion dollars, Murdoch hoped to take over the network, and thus an even more significant portion of Britain’s media market. (Murdoch abandoned the deal, which critics saw as monopolistic, after the implosion of the News of the World.) The e-mails between Michel and Smith were disturbingly cozy. At one point, Michel emailed James Murdoch, his boss, with a detailed description of what Hunt planned to say the next day in a Parliamentary discussion of the BSkyB deal. The information, he added, with a semi-colon-based wink, was “absolutely illegal.” When questioned about the e-mail, Murdoch argued that it had been a joke, establishing, for maybe the first time, what British GQ deemed “the emoticon defense.”

Smith was gone by the day after James’s appearance—resigned, saying he had erred in pursuing “too close a relationship” with the Murdochs’ consigliere. Hunt defended himself in the House of Commons, but his continued service is far from certain.

The Murdochs’ war of attrition continued today, as Rupert underwent his second day of questioning, in the process blighting the reputations of everyone from his housekeeper (“a very strange bird”), to the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre. In one of the BSkyB e-mails, Michel writes to James Murdoch that he has heard from Smith about a conversation among editors at which Dacre “admitted he was purely motivated by commercial reasons” in his opposition to the BSkyB deal. This is hearsay, which is probably why Rupert Murdoch said, “I’m under strict instructions by my lawyers not to say this, but I’m going to.” He continued,

I was really shocked by the statement of Mr. Dacre that his editorial policy is driven by commercial interests. It’s most unethical.

The attack on Dacre, whose career I examined in a recent piece about the Mail, came, at least to me, as a surprise. Murdoch and Dacre are fierce competitors, but in the past they have mostly spoken of each other with the respect of élite sportsmen—Dacre has often said that is was agonizing to turn down Murdoch’s offer, years ago, to edit the Times. (The asymmetry of Murdoch’s warfare—he is a proprietor, Dacre is an editor—may be a better indication of his role at his papers than his assurances to Leveson that he doesn’t interfere.) Beyond that, throughout the phone-hacking scandal, Dacre has been the person most willing to mount an uncowed defense of popular newspapers. Dacre isn’t a friend of the Murdochs, but he was an oblique ally. The Murdochs’ willingness to treat their friends brutally isn’t an effective part of an attempt to persuade the public, and the law, that they were’t brutal to their enemies, or to people they’d never met.